Book Image

Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey

By : Andrea Magni
4 (1)
Book Image

Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey

4 (1)
By: Andrea Magni

Overview of this book

FireMonkey (FMX) is a cross-platform application framework that allows developers to create exciting user interfaces and deliver applications on multiple operating systems (OS). This book will help you learn visual programming with Delphi and FMX. Starting with an overview of the FMX framework, including a general discussion of the underlying philosophy and approach, you’ll then move on to the fundamentals and architectural details of FMX. You’ll also cover a significant comparison between Delphi and the Visual Component Library (VCL). Next, you’ll focus on the main FMX components, data access/data binding, and style concepts, in addition to understanding how to deliver visually responsive UIs. To address modern application development, the book takes you through topics such as animations and effects, and provides you with a general introduction to parallel programming, specifically targeting UI-related aspects, including application responsiveness. Later, you’ll explore the most important cross-platform services in the FMX framework, which are essential for delivering your application on multiple platforms while retaining the single codebase approach. Finally, you’ll learn about FMX’s built-in 3D functionalities. By the end of this book, you’ll be familiar with the FMX framework and be able to build effective cross-platform apps.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Delphi GUI Programming Frameworks
4
Section 2: The FMX Framework in Depth
13
Section 3: Pushing to The Top: Advanced Topics

Understanding messaging support

A very nice functionality that is built into the Delphi RTL (not only FMX) is contained in the System.Messaging unit. In this section, we are going to learn about this feature and how to take advantage of it in many situations where communication across different code parts is crucial. This also includes async events related to touch, gesture recognition, dialogs, and more. 

Basically, it provides a customizable, pluggable, publish-subscribe mechanism that can be used by application developers to bend toward an event-driven approach. This is especially useful while dealing with asynchronous interactions and, generally speaking, it is a good way to keep dependencies low (resulting in loosely coupled code).

This mechanism is used inside the FMX framework to provide some functionalities (that is, some OS-to-application interactions such as requesting an image from the system's image library or camera). We have seen it in action in Chapter 8, ...